Royal Mail and User Agents
So I've finally tracked down why Royal Mail's website looks horrible in Firefox on Linux. They sniff user agents and if it isn't one of their 'supported' browsers then they send different HTML that doesn't render properly.
Not only are they incapable of writing web pages that work across multiple browsers, they actually check for Firefox on Windows. If you have Firefox on Linux, which has the exact same Gecko engine, then you get sent the HTML which doesn't render properly. If you spoof your user agent, then all is fine.
Not only is this a big oversight, but it seems silly to go to all the trouble to sniff the user agents, if the HTML they send to unsupported browsers doesn't render correctly in any web browser anyway?
I have sent an email, but don't expect a reply, nor that they'll heed my suggestions.




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